Wednesday, August 29, 2012

"Pornography is destructive and it can ruin a person's life," says Reverend Grant Storms, who calls himself a "fundamentalist Christian Patriot".
Storms was quite popular for leading anti-gay rallies in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana and protesting Mardi Gras in New Orleans due to the flagrant sexuality expressed there.
Storms was arrested after masturbating in a public park multiple times and no pornography was present during those times.Read the story here.

Caleb Douglas Hesse, another Christian anti-gay activist who was slightly more centrifugal to the anti-gay movement in California was even worse... He was actually molesting kids... Here's a video you can watch about that:

Democrats shouldn't get too comfy between now and November because the Republicans are cookin' up all kinds of crazy and that always has its consequences for everyone... especially when there's a lot of money behind it.

We'll kick off crazy-fest 2012 with our reigning queen of drunken bigotry, Jan Brewer. Since her mostly failed attempts at Birtherism, immigration deform and hating on gay people, Jan Brewer has taken it upon herself to join her Tea Party fan-base in defining "personhood". She says that the idea that women can secretly prevent pregnancy from rape is only "a little bit outrageous" and that it's totally up to legislators and voters whether or not they agree. Brewer has outlawed abortions in Arizona after 20 weeks... making NO EXCEPTIONS for the life/safety of the mother if the doctor doesn't feel like it. It's an outrageous law that is not seeing nearly enough media attention considering that a woman could conceivably die from this in Arizona before the election.

Of course, we can't really discuss fetal personhood without an honorary mention of the grandfather of all screwy looney-toons soundbytes, Todd Akin. By now, you should know all about the idiotic belief system he holds and the statement that stirred the pot. But if you don't watch Rachel Maddow, then you wouldn't know all of THIS. Akin's coo-coo for cocoa puffs lunacy stems from other pro-lifers with these crazy ideas before him... including a man by the name of John C. Willke. Willke, if you’re curious, endorsed Romney’s 2008 presidential run—a fact Romney freely boasted about at the time. “I am proud to have the support of a man who has meant so much to the pro-life movement in our country,” Romney said in a 2007 release, according to the New York Daily News. Even some Florida Republicans have seriously twisted ideas about rape.

Todd akin did not act alone in this insanity, though. Which brings us to your Republican Vice Presidential hopeful, Paul Ryan. “Nobody is proposing to deny birth control to anybody,” said Paul Ryan in a CBS interview where he backed away from every single point in the pro-life agenda. This is a very DRASTIC flip-flop for the congressman. Akins and Ryan had conspired immediately upon Ryan's entrance to the House of Representatives to draft a fetal personhood bill called H.R. 3 which, if it had become law, would have legislatively overturned the Roe Vs. Wade Supreme Court decision and made NO EXCEPTIONS for a woman who is raped or the victim of incest. The Paul Ryan lie that "nobody is proposing to deny birth control" is a BIG LIE indeed, however. You can read all about these attempts (by Catholic Republicans like Ryan, no less) right here, here and here.

From Paul Ryan on the subject of fetuses, we come to the big guy - Mitt Romney. The "fetal skeletons" in Romney's closet were LITERALLY swept away by his corporation called Stericycle. It was an awful blow to the pro-life movement when they discovered that Mitt Romney had inked the deal for his Bain Capital corporation to purchase Stericycle. It is a company that they had been protesting all the while because it facilitates abortions by removing the "medical waste" and disposing of it properly. I don't need to tell you why pro-lifers have a problem with the term "medical waste". This is just the tip of the iceberg with Romney and Bain though. The time at which Mitt Romney saw over the acquisition of Stericycle was a time that he said he was NOT in the employ of Bain Capital. Obviously, since the signatures are there, and it was Romney himself conducting this business, he lied. This is also, conveniently, one of the many years for which Mitt Romney never released his tax returns. But it gets EVEN WORSE for the Presidential hopeful... It turns out that Romney lied yet even once more before all of this about his taxes... and the consequences of this other lie are insurmountable for him in his bid for the Presidency. Mitt Romney never paid any taxes from an address in Massachusetts. Why is that important? Because his eligibility to run for Governor of the State of Massachusetts was entirely predicated on the idea that he had. Romney had not been a Massachusetts resident for the required seven years. He brushed that concern aside by LYING. He told the people of Masshachsetts that he had paid TAXES in Massachusetts for seven years. It turns out that everyone just assumed nobody would tell a lie that big... They had apparently never met someone like Mitt Romney before... because he did in fact, lie.

Somebody who's very concerned about how all of this will pan out for Republicans is a man by the name of Bryan Fischer. Fischer is one of those guys that Paul Ryan now claims doesn't exist. He is totally in agreement with the Akins fantasy about "legitimate rape" not causing pregnancies. He also doesn't want women to have access to contraceptives. Fischer heads up the American Family Association. Immediately, you recognize that name because they are the secondary source of all things "anti-gay" in the United States. The first and foremost source being the hate group known as the Family Research Council. While party leaders were immediately frightened by the onslaught of adverse reactions to Akins' crazy "magic vaginas" story, Fischer was upset with them for reacting to it. His Twitter account relays: "Akin staying in. GOP elites, by gangtackling Akin instead of having his back, have put this seat in play. Loss is on them." This is basically like saying that a legislator should not be held accountable for being wrong about something... That even if something is a total fabrication - we'll all be fine as long as we stick with it.

Bryan Fischer draws from the same fanbase as 700 Club Televangelist, Pat Robertson. Of course, Pat Robertson has the heavy burden of explaining to Christian America what should be done with all the "persons" who will not be aborted when Republican policies take effect... You can apparently do whatever you want with unwanted kids after they're born... as long as you DON'T dare adopt them, says Robertson. No man is going to want to be tied down to the "whole United Nations" which includes "weird" kids of other races "who may have been molested" he says.Pat Robertson seems to be on a rampage against our nation's young people lately. The religious school that he owns is called Regent University. Of course, it's not a real university because it's a private religious school. The word "regent" means "governing in absense of a higher authority". School boards and county-area branches at all levels of government are often called "regents" or regencies. It has been this way for over 100 years, actually. But you guessed it... Robertson has assembled a crack-team of lawyers to restrict the government from being able to use the term. He is suing local community colleges and non-religious public schools to try to take ownership of the word that he's only been using since 1979.

Speaking of "other races" whose children one should supposedly not adopt, lest they find themselves hosting a United Nations convention in their living room - we would be remiss in not reminding you that the Tea Party Express still has plans to plow over every last brown-skinned American until there are none left. No man is better suited for this task than white America's favorite skinhead - Joe The Plumber. Joe has given up the glamorous job of plunging toilets so that he can enjoy Government funded healthcare at taxpayer expense as a United States Congressman. His plan is apparently to shrink the size of Government by adding himself to it. He is running in Ohio on a platform of "don't spread my wealth" and "let's start shooting at the Mexican Border". Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, Joe is very sensitive about being called a racist by "liberal Obama supporters"... he routinely complains about that on his facebook page, but he just leaves that statement dangling there without apology. Apparently, if Marco Rubio's parents happened to be anywhere near the border between Mexico and the United States, Congressman Plumber would suggest that border police should shoot at them. No joke.

Let's not forget that Joe The Plumber was brought to us by the same public relations department in the GOP that delivered Sister Sarah Palin to us. Palin, if you recall, put shooting targets over a map of Democrats in the United States, including one over the name and location of congresswoman Gabby Giffords who was shot, almost fatally, yet still luckier than a number of other innocent people at her event. The mainstream media has failed to mention that Jared Laughner (the shooter in Arizona) listed "Mein Kampf" as his favorite book on his YouTube profile. He also had a very creepy video he took of himself burning the American Flag in the Arizona Desert. The media mostly in concert with CNN and Fox News, decided apparently that since Laughner was "crazy", that it somehow ruled out the possibility that he was ALSO an antisemitic white supremacist and gun-nut. Shockingly, violent racists who are connected in any way to Sarah Palin are never held up to scrutiny for their political alliances.

Since Palin has gone national with a lot of support from Fox News and the Oil and Coal lobby - a new Republican has emerged in Wasilla, Alaska. His name is Mark Ewing... Palin would be so proud of Ewing. Some of his latest stump speech talking points have included "I love coal. I love the smell of burning coal in the morning." and "We need to educate our children, but there are certain individuals that are just not going to benefit from an education... like kids who have a hard time making their wheelchair move."Really? The latest Republican attack will be... against kids in wheelchairs! That's just made of win, isn't it?

My friend Monica had an interesting little video clip on her blog this morning that shows the much maligned "liberal gotcha media" in action... Soledad O'Brien from CNN gets tough with John Sununu over the difference between his claim that Obama has cut Medicare for seniors and the reality that a Democratic plan would actually just do some funny math and subtract from some kind of future savings. We've seen this before when it comes to the Right Wing budget hawks... They take any savings that Democrats can muster up and chalk it up to a "heartless cut to essential programs"... which of course, never turns out to be the case and then the other shoe drops and it was THEIR cuts that turn out to be the harmful ones.

This is an example of the more obvious and predictable propaganda that we expect from the right in every election... Most of America just tunes it out. But this year, there are much bigger truth-benders out there that voters won't immediately be able to put a finger on.

In 2010, I highlighted the funding behind Tea Party anti-healthcare reform demonstrations and how astroturf shills would dress up as doctors and nurses and "regular concerned citizens" and scream at our legislators about dystopian Nazi death panels...

We later learned that we could place a big chunk of the blame for those demonstrations on Koch Industries, a chemical company that hates regulation of any industry... and probably hates a black guy sitting in the White House as well. But one, more obvious culprit sort of slid under the radar to most of America... That, would of course, be the insurance industry... See, when we talk about "the insurance industry", we're talking about a collective alliance between all different types of insurance. Health Insurance, Auto Insurance, Life Insurance, Homeowner's Insurance... They've all got each other's backs and they don't have yours! Everybody knows it's a racket... and everybody is intimately aware of how much that racket is costing them.

Progressive Auto Insurance, if you recall, was rumored to be the principal source of funding for the gay rights advocacy group called GetEQUAL. GetEQUAL spent way too much time maligning other gay rights advocates and Democrats in congress to have been truly helpful in repealing DADT and fighting for equality. Now many of the activists were not privy to these politics at the time they started screaming at the President through bullhorns - but that's how Tea Party-style astroturf works... You can get well-intentioned individuals to do some pretty counter-productive things if you really put your mind to it.

Moving right along... another massive propaganda front against the current President of the United States is being mounted by the FORMER President of the United States... You didn't really think that George W. Bush went anywhere did you? Of course not... and he's not going to sit on the sidelines in this election. Over 70% of Romney's Foreign Policy ministry is made up of old Bush pals... This is not a fact that Romney wants you to be overly familiar with. It's a reluctant alliance... Bush was never really fond of Romney in the beginning but the good people of Salt Lake City, Utah proved just tricky enough to finally secure their guy as the Bush Dynasty's latest incarnation. What does an alliance with Bush get you? One hell of a new "Swiftboat" campaign... complete with Bush loyalists like Chad Kolton and a bunch of Navy Seals who will pretend that Obama's "loose lips" are sinking their ships...Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc. (or "OPSEC" for short) has all the same trappings as The Swiftboat Veterans For Truth but with a little more of an authoritative air.Of course, this would be Bush's contribution to the dialogue because one of the group's main objectives is to show that Obama is taking too much credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden, which has been a wound that Republicans just can't stop licking.Finally and perhaps the most destructive wing of the Republican Ministry of Propaganda that is active in the 2012 election cycle would be the small lobbying groups who control larger groups of ideologically driven special interest groups... These include, but are not limited to, Richard Berman's Center for Consumer Freedom, The Rand Center (which calls for "a revolt against today’s intellectual mainstream"),ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Commission), NRA (National Rifle Association) and the Family Research Council (FRC). In their alliances with right-wing "think tanks", these lobbyists produce massive quantities of anti-Democratic propaganda on a daily basis. They all work in tandem to create special right-wing "talking points" and then saturate the mainstream media with them. Many of the people associated with one of these groups are often associated with the others to varying degrees as well.One of these very well orchestrated projects was "Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day" which disguised itself as a response to an impending boycott from LGBT persons but which actually ended up serving to create a new right-wing media personality out of a Chick-Fil-A employee named Rachel. (To read in detail how they pulled THAT one off, click here. To watch Rachel join Fox News in a senseless refutation of "Obamacare" on behalf of all women, watch here.) Another project that these groups have been working on, which is truly frightening, is "The Real George Zimmerman". George Zimmerman, as everyone now knows is the white/hispanic guy who stalked, shot and killed an unarmed black teen named Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Before that event had even entered mainstream news in any meaningful way, a few websites popped up online which presented a self-defense theory on behalf of Zimmerman. The creepy problem with this concept is two-fold: 1) Zimmerman hadn't even made a self-defense claim at the time and was in hiding while President Obama among others advocated on Trayvon Martin's behalf. 2) The claims being made (supposedly by objective 3rd parties) were all based on smearing the victim's character and circumstantial "evidence" which would later become the key points in Zimmerman's defense when he was finally arrested on charges. The smears, which sought to incriminate Martin in his own murder were entirely based on the victim's race and repeatedly invoked statistics about African Americans and crime levels in the United States. In this last example, the "hidden agenda" is not merely freeing a supposedly "innocent" George Zimmerman - it is much more complicated than that. ALEC and the NRA have heavily lobbied Florida's government to enact laws like the now infamous "Stand Your Ground" rule of self-defense - an adjustment to the Castle Doctrine. The laws are far reaching and even nonsensical in their deregulation of firearm combat. The idea is that weapons manufacturers can use "panic" in the media to encourage more people to purchase firearms. A shooting like the one in Colorado at a movie theater can be turned into a reason to DEREGULATE gun ownership and encourage MORE people to carry concealed weapons around with them for supposed protection. However, the Stand Your Ground law fails to protect anyone at all and that becomes obvious when the Zimmerman/Martin case is considered. In order to dust away their own tracks and act like nothing shifty is going on, the NRA and ALEC need to do their very best to see it that the case goes down the way they want it to... as mere self-defense. They know that Zimmerman will have to go to jail - that is almost completely unimportant to them. The most important thing that the NRA and ALEC want, they've already achieved (as of yesterday), which is legally disconnecting the case from "Stand Your Ground". Another thing they hope to accomplish is putting enough racially motivated suspicion on the case to further implicate President Obama with the concept they've created from scratch - "black males who are going to get away with things if you let them".

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Just last week, Puerto Rico was all turned upside down about Obama's birthday...

Although, Republicans in Puerto Rico were apparently very confused and thought it was Michelle's birthday. Some of them still don't understand that the President's birthday is August 4th and his wife's birthday is January 17th. It's such an easy thing to find out on the internet.

But that's not how Puerto Rican Republicans like to use the internet... They like to upload pictures of their buttholes and send hateful, racist rants directly to the White House.

When Michelle Obama's staff uploaded a beautiful photo of her presenting a birthday cake to her husband, a few people used Twitter to "cyberbully" the First Lady by "tweeting" nasty messages underneath... No big deal, right? Republicans do that all the time... It's to be expected from them.

Well... It was very different for a woman named Heidi Anne Wys Toro because she is Secretary and Chief Political Strategist to Puerto Rico's Speaker of the House, Jennifer Gonzales.

In typical Republican fashion, Heidi Wys sent her tweet without even understanding that it was the President's birthday she was protesting - not Michelle's. But it's even worse because the tweet was horribly racist. She tweeted about the First Lady feasting on bananas and being taken to Obama's "homeland of Kenya"... This is slightly worse coming from an official in the territory of Puerto Rico because they try so much to be afforded everything that comes with the right of voting in our elections.

Puerto Ricans were OUTRAGED.

But do you think that Jenniffer Gonzales (R) did the right thing and fired this "strategist"? Of course not! She even defended the racist tweet as "Freedom of Speech" and aims to put the whole thing to rest... The problem is that this isn't even the first time that these kind of messages have come from her office... Evidently she's becoming known for this kind of thing.

Jenniffer Gonzales made sure to denounce the offending tweet but followed that up with the "free speech" defense and re-tweeted Ricky Martin's response in order to show her more reasonable side... Then she issued a lengthy statement on the matter that mostly just encouraged her fellow Republicans to remember that people can save things from the internet... so don't get caught being so typical because it will look bad for her come election time.

There's some irony in an "out of the closet" Ricky Martin stepping to the rescue here though... Particularly because of what I'm about to tell you next...

Gonzales is not the first Puerto Rican Republican to have "social networking" issues... Roberto Arango (R-PR) was quickly escorted out of prominence when he made Anthony Weiner's tweets seem like Sesame Street.... The anti-gay Republican, Arango, infamously came out of the closet with a series of photographs of his anus on full display using the gay iphone app called Grindr...

Two mugshots were released today... One highly anticipated, the other a sort of surprise...

The first mugshot was not a real mugshot at the time it was taken... It was a police evidentiary photograph of George Zimmerman, taken approximately one hour after he shot and killed an unarmed teen, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida.

Zimmerman later cooked up a story about the teen had supposedly attacked him and broke his nose, thereby giving him a self-defense claim for the shooting.

As you can see clearly here, Zimmerman's nose is NOT broken (at least not within that week)... A broken nose almost always causes a black eye. Zimmerman's nose bends to his left... indicating that he had suffered a broken nose a long time ago, maybe even years ago... but not recently.

Randy Travis has had a troubled life - in the mid 90's he was photographed in gay nightclubs and LGBT rights activists urged him to come out of the closet... If Travis was indeed gay, he went further in the opposite direction, getting married and joining a radical fundamentalist and anti-gay church. From there, his career took a nose-dive and now he is an actor in anti-Muslim propaganda films. Yes, Randy Travis is now known for being a Michele Bachmann/Pastor Hagee styled Islamophobe.

As you can clearly see in Randy Travis' mugshot, his nose also bends to his left... and the break likely happened during the process of his arrest... because he has the black eye to prove it.

Sandra Fluke was accused by right wing radio shock-jock Rush Limbaugh of being (among other things) a "slut" and a "whore" because she spoke to Congress in favor of healthcare laws that would permit coverage of contraceptives.

Jenna Jameson is widely known as the "Queen of Porn"... She has starred in such films as "Cum One, Cum All", "Convention Cuties", "I Love Lesbians", "Wicked", "Jenna Loves Pain", "Exposure" and "Dirt Merchant".

Here's what they have to say about the upcoming Presidential election:

Sandra Fluke: "I'll be standing with President Obama in Colorado because I believe we must defend [basic healthcare] rights for all women.When Obamacare takes full effect, we'll never again be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition like being a survivor of domestic violence or breast cancer, or having had a Caesarean section. Nor will we ever again be charged more than men for the same insurance just because we're women."

Jenna Jameson: "I’m very looking forward to a Republican being back in office... When you're wealthy, you want a Republican in office."

It's no secret that Arizona has become absolutely infested with Neo-Nazis since Jan Brewer took office... But their intermingling with the Tea Party receives very little media attention - until now. The "White Power" groups, it turns out, are BIG fans of Chick-Fil-A and have been resorting to well-orchestrated cyber-bullying attacks in order to fulfill their "chicken pride" dreams...

This story starts out with a Young Adult Fiction writer named Jackson Pearce... She's level-headed, witty, and her fans love her... She's a white, Christian girl who makes fun, upbeat YouTube videos and updates her Twitter account like every 10 minutes... seriously.

Jackson used to eat at Chick-Fil-A "all the time" until she decided that the company was indeed anti-gay and she joined the protest/boycott movement with this clever addition to the dialogue:

Now, as you can see from the above video, Jackson Pearce's idea is simple... Go to Chick-Fil-A during "chicken pride day" and ask them for a cup of free water... This, you should mention is a fulfillment of Biblical principle set forth in Proverbs 25-whatever...

But one Chick-Fil-A protester, Adam Smith in Tuscon, AZ sort of botched up the idea... He demanded "free water" without really asking for it... and he forgot to mention the Proverbs thingy... In short, you could say that Adam was a little bird-brained and forgot the key ingredients from the idea that Jackson Pearce cooked up... (See what I did right there?)

But Adam Smith was indeed, over-all, respectful and did not "abuse" the Chick-Fil-A employee... This is very important to note. The Chick-Fil-A employee (identified only as Rachel) was VERY respectful and polite... Adam's protest made her uncomfortable but she didn't lose her cool... Chick-Fil-A has every reason to be proud of her.

But although Adam's protest was maybe a bit "bitter" in the sense that he questioned how "Chick-Fil-A employees live with themselves"... He was also very polite and said "Thank You" and told the employee that she "deserves better" than what Chick-Fil-A can offer her...

Now - here's where the whole clucking thing gets deep-fried and battered and comes up as a big smelly ball of gizzards for the Tea Party.

Adam was fired for this...

Adam got fired from his job right after he uploaded the video to his personal YouTube account. The video wasn't made on company time and he didn't connect his off-the-clock actions to his employment on any level.

Adam worked for a medical supply company called the Vante Corporation in Arizona... It remained unclear how Vante knew about Adam's protest video so quickly and took such swift action against him within 24 hours... But I am going to clear that up for you now.

Indeed, within 24 hours of Adam making his anti-chick-fil-a protest video, not only did he find himself out of a job, but he was stalked, bullied and cyberbullied by random people he'd never even met before. Furthermore, in that same brief period of time, Adam's name and photo and personal email address were being blasted all over Twitter and even corporate press-release websites such as Marketwire and Business Insider...

This is the work of a Neo-Nazi "White Power" hate-group website called Stormfront.org... I will not link to the offending portion of their website for obvious reasons... But I will show you a screenshot from their YouTube video re-upload of Adam's protest video...

On the website itself, users do not always take the requisite precautions to obscure their identities and their Twitter accounts as "Tea Party" activists are easily located by anyone who looks into such things.
Stormfront.org was the first website to begin squawking and crowing (there I go again!) about their Chicken Pride Day success in getting Adam fired from his job at the Vante Corporation.

They had orchestrated the sabotage and were happy to log onto Twitter under their "Tea Party" identities (a friendlier face of hatred) and make sure that every "conservative" website was soon blogging about the "gay man" (not true in Adam's case) who had "assaulted" and "abused" an innocent Chick-Fil-A employee.
Even Fox News has such a story... and it's been less than 48 hours since the event took place... However the real story here is how the story was fabricated by the Tea Party in conjunction with a Neo-Nazi website...

Another question remains... Will the Vante Corporation hire Adam back and admit that they have no business prying into the private lives of their employees to such a degree? Or will we forever suspect that Vante itself is somehow connected to Stormfront.org?

Update: Adam has contacted me and admitted that his actions in the video are not his personal best - which is why he originally attempted to erase the video. Furthermore, I need to explain why I've copied both his video and Jackson's video for this blog post. Under the "fair use" clause in copyright terms, these videos are both "newsworthy" and should now be considered "in the public domain" since they are part of and directly relate to an ongoing issue in mainstream news.I am not attempting to claim that these videos are my own or that I have any right to use them beyond preserving/displaying them for their newsworthiness alone. I was not the first person to copy and display these videos and specifically Adam's video is one that he did not wish to have online anymore - since others have begun to edit the video in order to further harass him, I feel obligated to show the untouched version here to counterbalance that. I do not attempt to make any money from these videos or connect their creators with the opinions expressed in this blog. The facts and opinions expressed on Florida Squeezed are the author's own and are not necessarily endorsed by any other parties discussed or mentioned on this blog. 08/04/12 (Original blog post at 08/02/12)Watch Adam's sincere apology to Rachel here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmP9Shki6_I
It also contains some very interesting information about the way in which he was immediately bullied at work over something that people ordinarily wouldn't even have known about so quickly...